User blog:Deadcoder/Deadcoder's Reviews: Maiden Voyage
This review is being done at the request of User:Brenster23. He thought it would be a good idea to look at this episode from a programmer's perspective. My scoring system is simple: 10 - 0 with 10 being amazing, and 0 being Melanie Tran's acting. My review is, as usual, based on the English dub. =The Review= The episode starts off with a "Ditzy Jim, poetic sports" moment, mixed with a "Jeremie is bad at sports" moment. We then get a "bitter person at lunch" scene, mixed with Sissi making fun of the bitter person. Okay, so we're using recycled writing instead of recycled footage. I can work with this. Aelita insults Sissi with more wittiness than Odd usually does, not that it would take much. Yumi asks about what happened, and we get the gist of it, and she stops caring. Jeremie wonders if he's really bad at every single sport. Aelita, being his girlfriend, encounters the Aelita options! :0. Act suicidal and/or crazy. :1. Attack it with a long single note of angry music. :2. Have an argument with it. :3. Use Energy Fields. We're not on Lyoko, so 3 is out, and since this is neither Lyoko nor Broadway, 1 is out. Everyone except Jeremie is going to do 0 later on "including her", so 2 it is! She says, "no you really are bad at anything athletic." This proves my theory that communication and honesty have no place in relationships. He then brushes it off, claiming that he has more important things to do. Yumi asks what Jeremie and Aelita have been doing in the computer lab. Jeremie claims that they've been dealing with the remaining issues with the skid. Ulrich questions this, since they're both biologically teenagers. Jeremie then responds that the digital sea is still a deathtrap mystery, and there's still a chance that the Skid could get destroyed on the first dive. Effectively, they're not even in beta. Yumi points out that they're going to need to test it eventually. Mr. Delmas tries to get the attention of the students, and fails, miserably. Frankly, this is understandable. Mr. Delmas is so stupid that even Sissi and Odd can manipulate him. Following his instructions is probably stupid. Jim then gets the student's attention. We find out that the whole afternoon is free for a fire safety test. Given that this school is a safety disaster, this is a good thing. Everyone except Jeremie then argues that they should test the skid now, never mind that it's still being worked on, and may or may not even survive the environment that it's specifically designed to withstand. Jeremie relents, and agrees to do a trial run, but not with the Digital Sea, just to test out the launch procedures, which even they can't screw up. Cut to the factory, and we see Jeremie and Aelita explaining to the others, and the viewer, what the digital sea is like, and what Lyoko is like in respect to it. It's not really explained how they know what they know, but I guess they had to do SOMETHING with all the data they gathered in season 2. When asked what the digital sea is like, Jeremie makes a wild guess, then tells them that he actually doesn't know. Odd then starts to go to the scanners, never mind that Jeremie just said that they have no clue what's in the Digital Sea, and he may miss something important about it. At this point, you have to wonder why the characters have such a death wish. My theory is that, by this point in the series, all of the characters except Jeremie have had at least 1 Aelita of trauma by this episode. The best explanation for their behavior that's likely to get them killed, is that they're trying to get them selves killed. Everyone except Aelita and Jeremie start to go to the scanners, and Aelita's only reassurance is that she'll be piloting the skid. This is further re-enforcement of my death wish theory. Blah Blah Blah, season 1 virtualization music, Carthage music. They get to the skid, and we finally get the season 2 virtualization music. We then find out that Aelita will be piloting the skid. I like how it's very obvious that there's 5 slots for people, implying that they intend to rescue William, having a slot for him when he returns. It makes me wonder why they shunned him when they rescued him though. MAKE UP YOUR MINDS! We get a pretty good first-person shot from Aelita. Ulrich then has to remind Odd that this isn't a video game, because he's a moron. Everyone else is annoyed by this. They finally launch the skid, and it leaves Carthage. Jeremie opens one of the Data tunnels, and they send the skid through it, emerging in a giant orifice on at the Desert Sector. Didn't those tunnels initially go to the way towers? I guess we can ignore that since the system has been reprogrammed. Jeremie opens a celebration drink, being happy that the think hasn't blown up yet, and asks if they're ready to put it back in dry-dock. I would like to point out that this was less than an hour since Jeremie said that he wasn't sure the skid would even survive touching the digital sea. The other characters still say that they should try to dive into the digital sea. Jeremie relents, since he's apparently as spineless as Jim says he is. The other characters continue with the most imaginative drowning suicide ever. Some people have wondered, "Why do they stop the skid and then drop it into the sea?" My answer is simple. They just made a major dive from what appears to be 100+ meters above the sea, and probably more, since the animators have no sense of scale. At a drop from that height, water is as strong as concrete. Slowing down for the dive is probably a good idea. Yay! The animators understand basic physics! Once the skid is in the sea, Jeremie tries to contact them. They don't answer. At this point, I kind of want them to be dead, because they had it coming. YOU WERE EXPLICITLY TOLD THAT THIS COULD KILL YOU, AND YOU DID IT ANYWAY! I have to frown at Aelita though. With all of her previous deaths and suicide attempts, she always had the DECENCY to not hurt third parties in the process. But in this case, she just probably killed 3 other people to. We find out that they're alive, and all is well. MINUS 2 POINTS for an extremely rude suicide attempt, and for not killing these should-be darwin candidates. We then see the skid leave an orifice with teeth. I would like to point out that this is the entire premise of the movie "Teeth", a horror movie about Vagina Dentata, a real medical disorder. In fairness though, this is a unique angle to showcasing that medical problem. They then have the skid swim around in the digital sea to classical music. What I want to know is why there's neon billboards in the sea. I guess that theyr'e a google experiment in advertising. Jeremie tells them to get back to Lyoko, saying "I said 5 minutes." and they try to return. They try to return, and it turns out that the navigation system has bugs, so it's impossible to auto-navigate back to Lyoko. Minus one point to Aelita, for not trying to keep track of where they were going, knowing that Jeremie wrote the navigation system. Anyone who does that DESERVES to run out of fuel and die. Since Jeremie is more sympathetic than I am, he actually tries to save them. Odd, being a moron, still tries to start a fight with Jeremie about it. Jeremie points out "I'm not the one who insisted on this trial run odd, so cool it!" As an indicator of just how stupid and desperate the situation is, AELITA is the rational one, and tells Odd to calm down. Jeremie leaves to go get what he needs, telling them to stay where they are. Since Aelita has a deathwish, they don't do exactly that. Since Jim is an idiot, Jeremie is able to get to the Dormitory Building. Everyone on the skid notices the water turning red. Like at water parks, this will turn out to be very bad. Meanwhile, Jeremie is able to get into the Dorm building. It turns out that the school has the teachers acting like prison guards in the dorm building, but like in actual prisons, they don't care. In the sea, the Lyoko Warriors find a think that appears to be Lyoko. We then see Jeremie climb on the roof, to get to his room. Since Aeltia has some kind of poorly explained connection to Lyoko, she figures out that the sphere isn't Lyoko, and they move away from it. Jeremie gets to his room, and grabs the CD, never mind that now he has to go back. Meanwhile on Lyoko, the skid encounters the first two Kongres. They try to evade them. We find out that Aelita's insane driving comes from Odd. It turns out that the skid is almost out of energy, and they need Jeremie to get there ASAP. He does. But they're burning too much energy evading the monsters, and need to stop burning so much energy, so they can survive long enough for the debugging. :Odd: "But if we stop moving, we'll get killed!" :Jeremie: "Not my problem! You're the ones who wanted to run this test, that I advised against. You're probably all going to die, and it's your own fault. I'll still try to save you, but no promises here." :Odd: "Can I at least have a last meal?" :Jeremie: "No." :Yumi: "Ugg, I'm surrounded by red water and waiting to die. It's the swimming pool all over again. " :Aelita: "Jeremie, I'm not going to die in a giant period joke, not after already having piloted through the world's largest case of Vagina Dentata!" :Ulrich: "Now you know how I feel with Yumi." :Aelita: "Anyway, it's time to deploy the design elements we stole from Star Trek: The Next Generation!" Apparently, the Skidbladnir was designed by the designers of the Enterprise D, so they deploy the nav skids to take out the kongres. Jeremie finishes the debugging, and they get back to Lyoko, and Earth. The characters go over what they found, such as what the sea is like, a giant unknown sphere, and the kongres. Since it looks like Lyoko, it must be a knockoff of Lyoko, Jeremie deduces. Ulrich therefore plans for them to explore it. We get a joke about what happened with Jeremie while they were on the Skid. None of the characters believe what he did. Review Summary This episode is a giant PSA about Beta Software. Yes, it should be tested. But remember: IT CAN STILL SCREW UP! The characters ignored this, and insisted on trying out the skid anyway, and nearly died. Everyone except Jeremie was a reckless idiot in this episode, and honestly, they should have had a far closer brush with death. This was before "Down To Earth" when I still thought the characters were decent human beings, so I still wanted them to live. This episode was average. It managed to have a little suspense, and grow the plotline. However, the characters were complete morons, the writing could have been a lot better, and the fire drill wasn't realistic. However, the digital sea animation was GORGEOUS! Overall rating: 6/10. Category:Blog posts Category:Maiden Voyage